questions, uncertain of himself, and in many things ready to lean too much on others.

Chase could have forgiven Lincoln for his weakness in leaning on others, if Chase himself had more frequently been the man on whom Lincoln leaned.

While Lincoln's deference to Seward made him cautious about too much reliance upon Chase, and Chase's own temperament offered its further bar to intimacy, there was a very real sense in which Lincoln's reliance upon Chase was great. Chase was not primarily a financier, but he was conscientious and thorough, and he mastered the work of his office in a way that made him indispensable to the country. Any war of considerable length and importance depreciates the currency of a country, and causes the disappearance of silver and gold coin. Gold, which became abundant after the discovery of the rich deposits in California, disappeared from circulation in 1861, and there came a time when it required $2.851⁄2 in paper money to buy one dollar in gold. Silver also went into hiding. The silver quarters, dimes, half-dimes and three cent pieces, which had been abundant, disappeared from circulation. Change had to be made in postage stamps. As these were certain to stick together when carried in the pocket, ungummed stamps were issued to be used as a circulating medium. These in time gave place to the "shin-plasters," paper money on sheets measuring two to three inches, and issued in denominations of five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cents. Later there issued three cent and fifteen cent "shin-plasters." These solved for many years the problem of fractional currency. But there was need for something other than this, that of national bank notes to supply the demand for a medium of exchange in larger units. Salmon P. Chase became "the father of the greenback," a direct promise to pay on the part of the United States, and a legal tender except for duties and taxes to the United States Government, which still had to be paid in coin.

In a very important sense the greenback saved the country.

Although Chase was not primarily a financier, he was a man of recognized ability and of undoubted integrity. The moneyed interests of the country believed in him. While his presence in the Cabinet gave much discomfort to some of his associates and to Abraham Lincoln, Chase grew to be an invaluable man.

Seward and Chase were easily the leaders in Lincoln's Cabinet as it was first organized. Subsequently, they were compelled to share their responsibility with the new secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, who comes later into this narrative. The remaining members of the original Cabinet call for less extended consideration.

Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was thrust upon Lincoln's administration by the support of the Pennsylvania delegation which secured Lincoln's nomination in Chicago in 1860. Cameron accepted the position of secretary of war, and his appointment proved acceptable to his political friends. Cameron is believed to have been personally honest, but some of his friends were not so; and he was in bad repute with a large section of his own party in his own state. Lincoln did not retain him long. Cameron was furnished with a post sufficiently far beyond the ocean to remove him from overmastering temptation to serve his friends in the matter of fat army contracts.

Besides Seward, Chase and Cameron, a fourth member of Lincoln's Cabinet had been his opponent in the Chicago convention. Edward Bates, whom Lincoln appointed attorney general, was a fine, dignified, gentlemanly and scholarly lawyer of the old school. In 1847 he had presided over the River and Harbor Convention in Chicago. There Lincoln first met him, and there Greeley also first came to know him. Bates was Greeley's first choice as a compromise candidate for the presidency against Seward, and he believed that Bates' residence in Missouri would make him strong in the border states. Though a former rival. of Lincoln, Bates proved a loyal member of the Cabinet and an efficient supporter of Lincoln's administration.

For secretary of the navy, Lincoln appointed Gideon Welles, a leading editor of New England. Though inexperienced in naval matters, he conducted his department with no little ability. He was one of Lincoln's most loyal supporters, as subsequently he was a staunch defender of Andrew Johnson.

The diary of Gideon Welles is the most intimate document we possess in the inner workings of the government in Lincoln's administration, and shows us plainly the antagonisms which existed in the Cabinet and near it. Welles himself had his own very marked prejudices. He was a Democrat, and had no love for Seward. Stephen A. Douglas distrusted Seward, and communicated his added distrust to Welles in the short period in which Douglas was in Washington after the beginning of Lincoln's administration. Welles came to cherish a deep hostility toward Stanton, and he hated General Halleck, but his pet aversion was Senator John P. Hale, of New Hampshire, chairman of the Senate Committee on the Navy. Welles found that the War Department was inclined to think the Navy Department little more than a subordinate branch of its own sphere of influence, and one to be ignored or denounced as occasion might seem to justify.

Caleb B. Smith, whom Lincoln appointed secretary of the interior, was a prominent Indiana politician. Lincoln had known him since they had served together in Congress in 1847 and 1848. He was a fair representative of the sentiment of Indiana, and, while one of the less conspicuous members of the Cabinet, was a faithful one.

Montgomery Blair, who accepted the office of postmaster general, represented a famous Missouri family. His father, Francis. P. Blair, Sr., had been a prominent editor during Jackson's administration, and was one of the ablest men associated with Jackson. He was a friend of Martin Van Buren and Thomas Hart Benton. He was a strong opponent of slavery, and a fear

less man.

His wise counsels and his trenchant pen had done. much in building up the party which had now come to power. His two sons, Montgomery and Francis P., Jr., had opposed the Dred Scott decision, and had done much to hold Missouri in the Union. While the Blair family was cordially hated by one faction in Missouri, it had the unfaltering loyalty of another and influential faction. Lincoln strengthened his Cabinet by the inclusion in it of a member of this distinguished family, but did not promote the Cabinet's comfort thereby.

Such was the official family which Abraham Lincoln gathered around him at the beginning of his administration. It is little wonder that his selections caused his friends grave solicitude. If Chase accepted with bad grace a position subordinate 10 Seward, Seward's friends with equally bad grace insisted that Chase should have had no place whatever in the Cabinet. But Lincoln was able to hold both these men and all the others, through an ability of leadership which, at the outset, few men understood, and which the Cabinet itself came slowly and reluctantly to recognize.

On the night of the inaugural ball, Stephen Fiske, then Washington correspondent of the New York Herald, asked Mr. Lincoln if he had any message to send to James Gordon Bennett, editor of that paper. Bennett was frankly antagonistic to Lincoln and his administration. "Yes," answered Lincoln, "you may tell him that Thurlow Weed has found out that Seward was not nominated at Chicago."

Not for some time did the correspondent understand that this was one of Lincoln's jokes. It was a very serious joke; it was Lincoln's declaration that he was master of the situation. Thurlow Weed, who had been endeavoring to crowd Chase out of the Cabinet, and Seward, who had declined a secretaryship on the very eve of the nomination, had both discovered that Weed had not succeeded either in the nomination or in the control of the executive.

While Lincoln suffered from both Seward and Chase, he valued them highly. At one time when they resigned simultanecusly, Lincoln very skilfully played each against the other. Remembering his boyhood experiences in carrying loads on horseback, he said, "Now I can ride ahead; I have a pumpkin in each end of my sack."

The late lamented P. T. Barnum had in his menagerie a cage which was the most popular among those who frequented his show, containing a "happy family." It was composed of animals of diverse disposition which had been taught to live together. Lincoln's Cabinet was something after this sort. It was not the ingenuity of the showman that devised Lincoln's "happy family," but the skill of a leader who gathered about him men of ability and character, with little regard for their liking for him or one another, but each of whom he judged to be capable of rendering to the country a service. It was his genius and patience and unselfishness which taught these men to live and work together, not always comfortably, but on the whole effectively.